Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World (69 page)

The King, who had been staying at Woodstock and was perhaps concerned about Elizabeth’s health, joined her at Langley on September 28,
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and probably accompanied her for the rest of her progress. On October 6 she visited Minster Lovell Hall, where William Hamerton built her a bedstead.
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The hall was the former residence of Francis Lovell. He had disappeared in 1487 after fighting on the wrong side at Stoke,
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and the manor was now nominally in the hands of Prince Henry. The Queen gave money to an old footman to the prince who was now residing in an almshouse at Abingdon, where on October 13 she presented rich offerings to the silver effigy of Our Lady of Abingdon in the chapel of the Austin Friars.
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At Ewelme more memories of the House of York awaited her, for the palatial house had been the seat of her kinsfolk, the de la Poles, so recently disgraced, and was now in royal hands. Here, Elizabeth played dice and received messengers from Prince Henry and Margaret Beaufort; she also marked the feast of St. Edward the Confessor. Three days later she had moved on via Henley to Easthampstead, Berkshire, a royal manor lying in the Forest of Windsor, where she rewarded a “disare,” or reciter, “who played the shepherd before the Queen.”
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Elizabeth was back at Richmond Palace before October 25, when rewards were paid out to those who had brought her gifts of apples and woodcocks. Two days later she was rowed to Westminster, where she stayed until November 14. On the day of her arrival she sent her
barge to Durham House to collect her daughter-in-law, Katherine, who stayed with her until November 6. The Queen made her offering on the Feast of All Saints on November 1, took communion, and rewarded the young choristers of the King’s Chapel for their singing. Later that day she visited Westminster Abbey with Henry to make more offerings in observation of the obit of his father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and to pray at the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor. Around November 4, Elizabeth paid for fifty-two barrels of beer, which she gave annually in alms to the Observant friars of Greenwich, and two days later she sent 15s.8d. [£380] in alms to the Abbess of the Minories and the nuns she had succored there in May.
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Her accounts show that in November and December her embroiderer, Robinet, and seven hired embroiderers were “working upon the Queen’s rich bed,” probably at Richmond, in readiness for her coming confinement, for “she intended to [be] delivered at Richmond”;
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the hangings were embroidered with white and red roses and clouds, and edged with red satin. Later that month Elizabeth paid out 33s.4d. [£810] for a new trussing bed with a ceiler, tester, and counterpoint of crimson velvet with blue panes, and great rings for the bed curtains; she also ordered a cloth of estate of rich crimson cloth of tissue (taffeta), a pile cloth (possibly a rug or a thick towel) of linen, and matching curtains, together costing £46s.4d. [£1,130].
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Elizabeth was looking for suitable staff for her coming child’s establishment. Dame Katherine Grey recommended a nurse, a Mistress Harcourt, who had an audience with the Queen at Westminster on November 14, before Elizabeth left for Greenwich, but was dismissed with a gift of 6s.8d. [£160].
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From Greenwich, on November 19, Elizabeth removed to Baynard’s Castle, where she received several gifts on November 23. Her cook, Brice, had bought chickens and larks prior to her coming.
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Elizabeth was still looking after the needs of the Courtenay children. In November she paid a man to deliver messages from Lord Henry and Lady Margaret at Havering to the court, probably to their mother. She also paid for clothing for young Henry Courtenay: a gown of black damask lined with sarcenet, a gown of tawny medley bordered with sarcenet, a coat of murrey camlet, a bonnet and a petticoat
(the little boy had not yet been put into breeches). She also reimbursed Margaret Cotton for hose, shoes, laces, soap, and other necessaries for the children, including candlesticks and cloth to line a cupboard.
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On November 24 a French nurse was interviewed by the Queen at Baynard’s Castle; like the previous nurse, she too was sent away with 6s.8d. [£160]. The next day Elizabeth gave alms to a poor man who once served her father, and paid a messenger who had fetched bucks for the King from the estate of Sir John Seymour in Savernake Forest.
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If there had been a coolness between the royal couple, it was probably thawing.

On November 26, Elizabeth returned to the Palace of Westminster. As the winter of 1502–03 drew on, she may still have been unwell or needed to rest, as she did not resume her daily checks on her account book. At the end of November her fool, Patch, was rewarded for bringing her pomegranates and apples. On December 5, the eve of St. Nicholas’s Day, when custom dictated that “boy bishops” be appointed in place of priests in churches, she made a generous gift of 40s. [£970] to “the Bishop of the King’s Chapel at Westminster.” Appropriately, on St. Nicholas’s Day itself, when gifts were given to children, the Queen outlaid 5s.6d. [£130] for the expenses of those who brought the Courtenay children “from Sir John Hussey’s place in Essex unto London,” in time for Christmas. She made offerings on St. Nicholas’s Day and in the chapel of Our Lady of the Pew in Westminster Abbey on the eve of the feast of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, and on the feast day itself, December 8. On December 9 she sent money to Henry Langton, another old servant of her father, and 12d. [£20] in reward to “a man of Pomfret” in an almshouse, who claimed to have lodged her uncle, Earl Rivers, in his house when the latter had been on the way to execution at Pontefract in 1483.
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It seems that her lost loved ones, and maybe the terrible events of 1483, were on her mind as Christmas approached.

On December 12, Elizabeth moved to the Tower. The next day she distributed £20 [£9,720] in rewards to the grooms and pages of her chamber “against Christmas,” and was no doubt grateful to receive a monk of Westminster Abbey, who brought her one of the abbey’s precious relics, “Our Lady’s girdle,” and was rewarded with 8d. [£20].
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“Women with child were wont to girdle with” it,
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and perhaps Elizabeth had found that the relic helped—psychologically at least—during earlier deliveries, or felt it would afford her special protection during her coming confinement. Given her poor health during the past year and her many offerings at shrines, she may have been anxious about the outcome of this pregnancy, as she was before her previous labor, although there is much to suggest that she had good cause for concern this time: she had been unwell, on and off, for months.

On December 21 the Queen went by barge to Mortlake and thence to Richmond, where she spent her first Christmas without Arthur—and the last Christmas of her life. Six does were delivered for her table on Christmas Day. When she went in state with the King to Mass on that solemn feast, Prince Henry was with them. The children of the King’s Chapel sang a new setting of a carol by William Cornish, for which Elizabeth rewarded him with 13s.4d. [£320]. She also rewarded the King’s minstrels with 40s. [£1,000] for their psalms. She made offerings on the feast days of St. Stephen (December 26), St. John the Apostle (December 27), the Holy Innocents, or Childermas, as it was known (December 28), and St. Thomas of Canterbury (December 29), and sent a “Dr. Uttoune” to offer on her behalf at Becket’s shrine and other places in Canterbury.
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We learn of the cheering entertainments enjoyed by Elizabeth during the twelve days of Yuletide from her accounts and other sources. She drank Rhenish wine she had ordered, and was given 100s. [£2,450] for “her disport at cards” on St. Stephen’s Day. She gave rewards to Princess Margaret’s minstrels, who entertained her, and to a Spanish dancing girl, who had probably come to England in the train of Katherine of Aragon. On New Year’s Eve ten more does were brought to her from the park at Odiham, Rutland. She gave gifts on New Year’s Day, rewards to those who had sent presents, among them the servant of Margaret Beaufort, and alms to the poor. The recipients of her gifts were numerous, and included several servants of the King, the royal minstrels, “the children of the privy kitchen,” and “the lord of misrule,” who traditionally held sway over the revels at court.
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Henry gave her 10s. [£240] out of his privy purse, to pay for disguisings, and
£20 [£9,700] for furs. His expenses also record rewards to “the Abbot of Misrule,” the players of St. Albans and Essex, and “the children of the King’s Chapel for singing of
Gloria in excelsis
.”
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On January 4, 1503, Elizabeth made a donation to the fraternity (guild) of St. Clement by Temple Bar, the western entrance to the City of London. Three days later, now heavy with child, she was conveyed with her ladies by her bargeman, Lewis Walter, “in a great boat with twelve rowers” from Richmond to Hampton Court. Here she retreated to a “cell” to spend time in private prayer before she was confined,
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which suggests that her health was still giving her cause for concern. She was placing much faith in astrologers, who had promised her “this year to live in wealth and delice.”
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At New Year the court astrologer, Dr. William Parron, had presented the King with his annual almanac; this year’s was an exquisitely bound manuscript, the
Liber de optimo fato
(
Book of Fortunes
),
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in which Parron prophesied that Elizabeth would live until she was eighty or ninety, and would bear the King many sons.

Elizabeth stayed at Hampton Court until January 14, when Lewis Walter rowed her and her ladies back to Richmond.
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Preparations were still apace for her confinement there, and on January 20 the King sent one of his grooms to fetch Robert Taylor, her surgeon, to Richmond,
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possibly because she was again unwell. As male surgeons were excluded from obstetrics, Taylor may have performed bloodletting—a common function of his profession—to balance the humors in her body, according to the prevailing belief that an imbalance caused illness. Of course, if Elizabeth was anemic, bleeding her would only have exacerbated the problem.

At this time Elizabeth was thinking of her aunt, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk, mother of the unfortunate Edmund da la Pole, and the Courtenays. Her privy purse expenses record: “Item, for a pair of buskins for the Duchess of Suffolk, 4s. [£100]. Item, to William Gentleman, page of the Queen’s chamber, for carrying of two bucks from Windsor to London, the twenty-fourth Day of [January], one to the Duchess of Suffolk, &c., 5s.4d. [£130].” That month also, hearing that Lord Henry Courtenay had fallen sick, Elizabeth outlaid 10s. [£250] to a surgeon, Richard Bullock, for medicines.
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Henry VII, having a “singular and special devotion” to the Virgin Mary, had decided to build a splendid new Lady Chapel at the east end of Westminster Abbey as a shrine for Henry VI, whom he had tried—so far unsuccessfully—to have canonized. It was not originally intended as a mausoleum for the Tudor dynasty, for from 1496 the King had made payments for the rebuilding of Henry III’s thirteenth-century chapel of St. Edward at Windsor Castle as a “tomb house” for the anticipated shrine to Henry VI; and here, he had decided, he and his Queen and their royal descendants would be laid to rest. The old chapel at Windsor lay to the east of the new St. George’s Chapel, which was begun by Elizabeth’s father, Edward IV, and continued by Henry VII, who completed the choir and nave.

But in 1498, in response to a protest by the monks of Westminster, who wanted the relics of Henry VI moved from St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, to their abbey, the King agreed that his uncle should be buried there. Between 1498 and 1502 he had the thirteenth-century Lady Chapel at Westminster demolished, along with the chapel of St. Erasmus—founded two decades earlier by Elizabeth Wydeville—in which lay Anne Mowbray, Duchess of York.
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In July 1501, Henry commissioned his tomb at Windsor, and work proceeded there until January 1503, when he changed his mind and decided that he and Elizabeth would rest in a tomb in the center of the new Lady Chapel at Westminster, before the principal altar; and that he would have Henry VI’s remains moved to a new shrine at the east end as soon as the saintly king had been canonized.

In his will of 1509,
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Henry gave the reason for his change of heart as the fact that his grandmother, Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, was buried at Westminster: she had been laid to rest in the original Lady Chapel. Yet when that chapel was demolished, and her open coffin placed aboveground beside the tomb of Henry V, Henry VII made no effort to have it reburied or to erect a new monument. In fact, as Stow noted in 1598, her remains “remaineth aboveground in a coffin of boards behind the east end of the presbytery,”
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where they stayed on public view until 1777. But Henry VII had a more important reason for wishing to be buried in Westminster Abbey. It was the church in
which English sovereigns had been crowned since 1066; it housed the shrine of the sainted King Edward the Confessor, around which many kings and queens were buried; and interment there would serve to reinforce the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. Here, according to a Latin inscription placed later around the tomb built for him, he “established a sepulchre for himself, and for his wife, his children, and his house,” where he and his descendants would lie in glory for eternity.